South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korean Intellectual Property Office on Friday held a kickoff meeting for the second year of the "Easy patent information agent model" development project at the government complex in Daejeon, and began full-scale work on the project.

The development is part of the ministry's Public AX Project. KIPO, which proposed development of the Easy patent information agent in last year's call for Public AX Project tasks, was selected and has been implementing functions including patent document summarisation and chatbot-based patent explanations.

In the second year of the project, the agencies will expand the agent model's functions and apply it to KIPO's intellectual property information search service, KIPRIS. It plans to explain patent literature, which can be unfamiliar and difficult, in an easier way tailored to users' levels, and support users in understanding technical content and searching for similar technologies through conversations with an intelligent assistant.

At the kickoff meeting, the agencies introduced progress in developing the agent model and plans to apply the completed model to KIPRIS. Participants also discussed ways to promote use of KIPRIS using the agent's functions.

Jeong Jae-hwan (정재환), director general of KIPO's Intellectual Property Information Bureau, said applying an intelligent assistant to KIPO's search service would allow anyone to explore and use patent information easily and conveniently. He said he expects patent information previously used mainly by experts to be widely used by all citizens.

Hong Seong-wan (홍성완), director general for information and communications policy at the ministry, said MSIT will also do its best to expand AI services that people can feel through the Public AX Project.